


The Dance of Truth on Rusted Tongues

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 21:52:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1403746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.  </p>
<p>Craig Brice doesn't always understand Jack Bellingham, but he keeps trying all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dance of Truth on Rusted Tongues

**Author's Note:**

> When I first began writing these stories I had a somewhat limited pool of episodes to watch and somehow missed that Bellingham's canonical name is Bob and not Jack. I used Jack as a placeholder, and it's stuck. Please forgive me my trespass into headcanon.

Craig Brice is beginning to understand that the other side of Jack Bellingham, which he has been looking for, is simply not there. There is no other side. Jack is many things - slothful in some ways, and fierce in others - but above all guileless. 

Perhaps his nickname is more apt than their co-workers would reckon it to be - Jack has his priorities, and, like an animal, he tends them with all his heart, without particular concern for anything else. He will let dishes go unwashed in the sink because he is concerned with resting, and therefore with being alert for his shift. He doesn't make his bed in the dorms to standards because, as he points out, 'So what if the chief can't bounce a quarter off my sheets? So what if I can't crease a hospital corner? This ain't a hospital, and my bed's got nothin' to do with stabilizing a patient.'

There is a certain kind of eloquence to that which even Craig finds himself able to understand. This distresses him. He tries to ignore it. 

Jack sees right through him. Jack has no other side. Jack is without guile or cruelty. Craig feels passionately for him and doesn't entirely understand why, or how. The physiologic responses are quantifiable, but he struggles when he tries to remember the last time - if ever - he felt this way about someone. There was Billy Cunningham, who was his friend. But they were only children, and Billy was sent away. There were young women who came at proscribed times to his father's house in Hampden, and to the summer cottage in Strafford, and one or two of them he knew, but all he recalls of them is hidden smiles, lurching in his stomach, the sense that the adolescent sitting across from him while their parents talked didn't want to be there, and knew that he didn't, either. 

When Craig Brice is nervous, agitated, he fixes things in their right places. This is what he calls it. This is what he has called it since he was a child, sitting in his room and lining up his toy cars by color and type and size. His father hated the habit, which carried over to straightening books and polishing silverware, repeatedly. As if compelled. Craig hated the compulsion, the desperation lurking under the surface, and was glad his father berated him fiercely every time his fingers twitched. At least, when he groomed his horse in his father's barn, there was some sense to the act of repetition. It calmed him. It calmed the horse, whose official (and officious) name was Ardent Nightfall out of Mary's Grace by Santa Ana Strider, but which Craig had named (secretly) Orion. He did not have many secrets in his life then. Tending Orion had soothed his unquiet thoughts. 

The first time he slept at Jack's apartment - it was after a long shift, and he was tired, and it was after Jack and Jack's hands and Jack's voice and the weight of his body had brought him to a trembling and unfamiliar release and he was vulnerable and raw, and Jack offered to drive him home, and he was weak and said he wished to stay. It was true, he wished to stay. He wanted Jack. 

And Jack had put on clean sheets. And made the bed. Because he _hoped_ that Craig would stay. Craig was too exhausted, too high on his orgasm for it to hit him fully - someone, anyone, wanted him to _stay._

But he woke disoriented and shaking and thinking of Jack and smelling like Jack like dimestore aftershave and laundromat powder detergent and sick with that old lurching feeling, that he'd broken the rules and would be caught because you had to be punished if you broke the rules, there were rules and there were _consequences_ and Craig Brice is a man who keeps the proper professional distance between himself and his co-workers excepting the inescapable fact that he wants Jack Bellingham's weight on him, pressing him into the mattress, preferably accompanied by Jack's heavy voice telling him it's alright. It was _not_ alright. 

There was a basket of clean laundry beside the basket of dirty laundry and no dresser, though Jack's uniform shirts and trousers were on hangers in his closet. So Craig folded all of the clean laundry and sorted it on the bed and his fingers still itched so and he threw it back into the basket and started again. 

He was on his third go-round with the laundry - about halfway through - when Jack was suddenly at his side. He flinched when Jack touched his shoulder, and flinched again when he realized it was stupid to be afraid. He kept folding, though. He couldn't stop folding. Jack stood there, until he was done. Craig was breathing hard and tight and he wanted, so badly, to mess it all up and start again, because he began to think of Jack again and the way he _felt_ and he still didn't know how to describe it or quantify it or ascribe it any meaning, and yet it meant _everything_ and he could not understand it and the voice in the back of his mind called him a mouth-breathing idiot, that he could not categorize a simple thing like his relationship to another, single human being. Co-worker. Partner. Paramedic. Patient. 

Patience. 

"Craig," Jack had murmured, and Craig shook himself long enough to realize he must still be tired, that he'd woken up the man in his own house. "What's wrong?"

It was the kind of voice Jack would use with a patient, someone in pain enough and scared enough to fight them, the kind of voice Craig had once used with Orion, in the barn, when it was raining hard and he was not good enough. 

Jack makes him feel feral. It's a hideous feeling. 

"I don't know," he'd said to Jack. It was an honest answer. Maybe the blackout curtains, or the rumpled sheets, brought truth to his voice. 

"Okay." 

Craig realizes that it is probably inappropriate to be folding his partner's clothes in his house, that there is a boundary there. But what boundary hasn't been crossed, between them? What do the rules of the game matter here, elbow-deep in Jack's clean laundry, with Jack just _waiting_ beside him? He has touched Jack's body, his intimate parts, has tasted his tongue, has been touched by him in ways utterly and appallingly un-clinical. 

"Yannow," Jack comments, "if y'wanted to pay me back for lettin' you stay, you could've just bought me a drink or somethin'." There is a dry brush of laughter in his voice. Craig is not sure that Jack is not making fun of him. Craig is never sure who is or isn't making fun of him, so he's learned long ago to abide it, as patiently as he can, because none of them understand the rules of the game anyway, or the dangers of it. The world is a vicious place. The paramedics, he thinks, should be best equipped to understand it. 

Elbow-deep, is right, isn't it? He grins. An uncomfortable weight on his face, that grin. The smug baring of teeth. He laughs a little, then stops abruptly. "I'm not laughing at you, Jack." Craig is not sure why it seems so intensely important that Jack know this. Another of those wild-animal feelings inside him. Animals never understand the nuances of the game. Instinct drives them. Fear. Feed. Breed. Single-minded, without caution to the consequences. _Animals._

He thinks of Jack's weight on him, and Jack's hands, and wrenchingly, of the dead creatures hanging in the shack behind the hunting lodge where his father attempted to teach him the intricacies of being a man. Craig starts to laugh again, and then he cannot stop. He laughs and laughs bent double, until he collapses to his knees by Jack's bed as if he is a child with his hands clasped in prayer and it only makes him laugh harder. 

He does not understand that he is crying until Jack lays a hand on his back, until Jack is sitting on the carpet beside him, until Jack's arms are flung around him and he's saying hey, hey, easy now, partner, easy. 

"I'm not laughing at you, Jack." He gasps. His face is wet and his throat is raw. He buries his face in Jack's covers and then jerks backward, not to mess up the bedclothes. As if they are not already. He was lying in them, after all. 

"I know that, but Christ, was I ever scared for a minute you'd really lost it." Jack touches his face, a gesture of profound intimacy - swiping a knuckle up his cheek - that Craig has to look away from him. He cannot, with any surety, recall anyone ever touching him like that. He is certain that his mother took care of him when he was sick, because that is what a mother does for her child, but if he was sick, he was very young, and it is vague inside him. 

"I am _not_ crazy." It's hot on his tongue, hot as sin from the pages of a Bible, a kind of vehemence he thought he'd forced down long ago.

"Who says you are? Little bit nuts maybe, but you're a paramedic, and we're all a little out there, aren't we?"

"I'm not crazy." No matter what his father told him, weak. No matter what his mother told him, stupid. No matter what else he was, not crazy. He left that all behind, striking out for California - for anywhere, really - when he was eighteen and done. 

"You're alright, Craig. Whatever anybody else says about you, you're alright." 

Craig buries his face in his hands. He smudges his glasses. He takes them off and wipes them on his tee-shirt but only succeeds in smudging them more, and the smudges drive him up the wall so he takes them off and he puts them on the floor at his feet where he settles beside Jack. He is staring into Jack's closet, where a spare pair of workboots is mixed up with a pair of sneakers and several shirts are scattered on the floor. He feels animal and crazy and his hands itch to fix, but he shoves his palms against his eyes instead. 

"It's true you aren't like everybody else, and hell, that thing with the drug box drove me wild for about a week or two, but I got used to it. I got used to it being you. You're getting better with the patients. Even Cap says."

"You never questioned me about the drug box..."

"I sure bitched about it, but, I could see it worked for you and I thought, I can work with that, 'cause it might just make us better partners."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. God. You haven't done anything wrong. Boneheaded, sure. But not wrong."

Craig looks at the ceiling which is not much better than the closet. The cracks look like wild creatures. Horses and deer and dogs. The blackout curtains, the rumpled bed, the smell of a home, a place where living happens. These things dance truths on his tongue. "You didn't know me when I was a boy. I was a difficult child." 

"I bet you were a model of discipline, mister walking rulebook."

"I was. I ran away once, you know."

"Everybody runs away sometime. We come back by suppertime, or, if we're really having a time of it, spend the night with a friend and come home for breakfast."

Craig sighs. "I did not. I ran away. I told you. Because I was difficult." Because he couldn't face the wolves inside him or the ones lunging at him from every quarter. Because he couldn't face the glass eyes of the dead deer and bear and elk in the hunting lodge where his father and his father's friends (as if he had any) took their sons and taught them the rules of manhood, which was to climb and clamber to the top, even if you had to trample the weak and the wounded in the process. 

"Where'd you come from?"

"I was born in Concord, New Hampshire. I was raised in Hampden, New Hampshire. I was admitted to a post-graduate year at a prep school in the Adirondacks, and the week before term started I withdrew a large sum from my savings, and bought a ticket on a trailways bus out of Albany. I did not go back."

"What about your family? Your dad? Your mom..."

Craig does not understand why Jack would ask this question. The answer he believed would be clear. "It was easier."

Jack seems to take this as a hint. He leans close to Craig, leans right on him, really, tugs him close. "Guess if you run away, you got to be running from something. Further you go, the badder it was, maybe."

Craig opens his mouth and Jack stops him.

"I won't make any assumptions. I won't. You tell me whatever you feel like tellin' me, ok? That's how being partners works, pally. I ask you, Craig, don't they have birthday parties where you come from? You got every right to tell me Jack, I'm gonna stuff a balloon up your nose if you don't cut that out."

Craig stifles a laugh. 

"I'm straight with you, okay? I'm always straight with you. You drive me fuckin' nuts with the drug box but I'm sure my missing buttons and wrinkled shirts are just as apt to bounce you right into the rubber room at Norwalk."

Craig shakes his head. "You must be insane, like Benson suggested."

"Partner, you made one hell of a ballsy decision barely out of high school, and I'd love to know the story of it, don't get me wrong. But one thing, please."

"Yes Jack?"

"If you're gonna buckle down laughing crazy on my bed, next time, can you warn me?"

"I don't think that comes with a warning, Jack."

"I just wanna make sure you're alright."

"You are awfully insistent on that point, Jack."

Jack blinks at him. "You're my friend."

Craig looks down at his knees, at his bare feet, at his glasses. "Is that what it is?"

"Yes, Craig."

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Folding your laundry."

Jack laughs. That resonant sound that makes Craig feel still to the core of his being. "Craig, I told you. You wanna thank me for the crash space, just buy me a drink. And maybe tell me a little more about how you went from prep school in New Hampshire to the fire department in Los Angeles, and we'll call it even."

Craig feels like there is a pile of blocks within him, precarious, waiting to be knocked down by so little as a sneeze. But Jack hugs him tight against his broad chest, and kisses the top of his head. And Craig has always been the fixing kind, putting things in their right places. Perhaps if all fails, again, and he is left kneeling at someone else's bedside as if in prayer to a God he probably never believed in, it won't be so bad, to have another set of hands. 

A partner. A friend.


End file.
